Since the news broke of sexual harassment and assault claims against Harvey Weinstein, one of Tinseltown’s most powerful movie moguls, ALM journalists have closely covered its connection to law firms and the legal industry. Whether the impact has meant more business for lawyers working for Weinstein or the company he formerly ran or more worries for firms facing harassment claims against their own lawyers, the legal community has felt The Weinstein Effect. In this Instant Insights, we’ve brought those stories together and will continue to update the collection as news develops.

Boies' Mea Culpa Doesn’t Cut It

How did a bona fide legend like David Boies get caught in this tawdry Harvey Weinstein mess in which his judgment and ethics are called to question?

So how did a bona fide legend like Boies get caught in this tawdry Harvey Weinstein mess in which his judgment and ethics are called to question?

There are two ways to view Boies’ role in the Weinstein catastrophe: He acted out of chutzpah or stupidity. Judging by what Boies has said so far, he’d prefer if you pick the stupid option.

In case you missed it, the backstory is this: Boies signed off on hiring Black Cube, an investigation agency, to thwart the publication of a New York Times story about Weinstein’s sexual abuses, according to The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow. (Black Cube’s investigators—one posed as a women’s advocate, while another pretended to be a Weinstein victim—ingratiated themselves with actress Rose McGowan and a journalist to pump them for information about Weinstein’s alleged assaults.) To top it off: The Times was a Boies Schiller Flexner client at the same time. (Less than 48 hours after The New Yorker story broke, The Times fired Boies Schiller Flexner.)

Unsavory allegations, unsavory client, unsavory techniques—plus a heaping serving of a possible conflict of interest. You couldn’t ask for a better setup for a story about the fall of a living legend. Most lawyers and law firms wouldn’t recover, but what about the legendary Boies?

To his credit, or because he has no other choice, Boies is not dodging the issue. His method is to fall on his sword. “We should not have been contracting with and paying investigators that we did not select and direct,” he told The New Yorker. “At the time, it seemed a reasonable accommodation for a client, but it was not thought through, and that was my mistake.”

Boies repeated those explanations in a public statement that followed. He stated that he made it clear to Weinstein that he would not represent him with respect to McGowan’s charge that the movie mogul raped her. He also reiterated that it was Weinstein’s other lawyers who “selected private investigators to assist him and drafted a contract.” And again, Boies emphasized that he signed the contract with Black Cube because, it “seemed at the time, like a reasonable accommodation for a longtime client.”

For the record, Boies did not respond to requests for comment.

I wish I could take Boies at face value, but it strains credulity to think that a lawyer—any lawyer, much less a very savvy one—would blindly sign a contract for something that he’s barely involved in. Indeed, there’s nothing “reasonable” about the accommodation. It would make far more sense if Weinstein’s other lawyers signed the contract, since they were the ones who are supposedly directing the private investigator.

Which raises this question: Was Boies and his firm truly that out of the loop about what the private investigators were doing, which was to dig up dirt on women to discredit them? That’s puzzling, since The New Yorker reports that the investigators sent summaries of reports to Weinstein’s lawyers (though it wasn’t clear which lawyers got them), and that Weinstein himself had forwarded photos of himself and McGowan to Boies and another lawyer who supposedly helped prove his innocence.

And although Boies admits that he knew what the investigators were trying to find (“I was told at the time that the purposes of hiring the private investigators were to ascertain exactly what the actress was accusing Mr. Weinstein of having done, and when, and to try to find facts that would prove the charge to be false and thereby stop the story”), he suggests that he was unaware about their sleazy methods and purposes: “Had I known at the time that this contract would have been used for the services that I now understand it was used for, I would never have signed it or been associated in any way with this effort.”

Boies seems to want it both ways: He knew that the goal was to stop the Weinstein story in its tracks, but he insists he didn’t know that the road to achieve those goals would be so sordid. Coming from a tough litigator who knows how to play hardball, that’s tough to believe.

As for the whole conflict-of-interest thing with the Times, Boies essentially relies on a technicality. In his statement, he says that “when we were engaged by the Times we made clear that we needed to be able to continue to represent clients adverse to the Times on matters unrelated to the work we were doing for the Times.”

Boies might be technically right about the (overly?) broad waiver, but that hardly seems to be the best argument to soothe an angry client. Not surprisingly, the Times fired Boies Schiller and issued this statement: “Whatever legalistic arguments and justifications can be made, we should have been treated better by a firm that we trusted.”

Boies is in a pickle, and he seems unsure about how to put distance between himself and his now former client, who happens to be one of the most hated men in America. “I don’t believe former lawyers should criticize former clients,” Boies tells Farrow in The New Yorker. But in the same breath, he sort of does just that: “In retrospect, I knew enough in 2015 that I believe I should have been on notice of a problem, and done something about it.”

Like lots of Weinstein’s male cohorts who have found themselves in his ugly ambit, Boies seems to be saying, “My bad. I could’ve, should’ve done something.” It sounds contrite, but I’m not sure it makes any real difference.

At the end of the statement he issued in the aftermath of The New Yorker story, Boies pleads his case:

I have devoted much of my professional career to helping give voice to people who would otherwise not be heard and to protecting the rights of women and others subjection to oppression. I would never knowingly participate in an effort to intimidate or silence women or anyone else, including the conduct described in The New Yorker article. That is not who I am.

And wouldn’t we all love to believe him?

Vivia Chen

Vivia Chen is a senior columnist at The American Lawyer and the creator of The Careerist blog.

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